SOUND SHARE LA

Organization Name

Website

Indicator

Please select the one indicator that is most relevant to your project or organization:
Arts & Cultural Vitality

What is your idea and how will it impact your indicator?

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SOUND SHARE LA:

Sound Share LA will serve as a rich resource exploring the past, present and future of creative music in Los Angeles. A dynamic website will provide the primary portal through which the public experiences the project. This online activity will be enriched by monthly community broadcast events in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. Sound Share LA’s mission is to cultivate appreciation and involvement in the diverse forms of progressive music created in Los Angeles.

WEBSITE:

The Sound Share LA website will be a free, comprehensive resource available to all. Multimedia offerings will include live radio programs, artist interviews, performance archives, themed DJ mixes, original films and articles. Highlights will be drawn from dublab.com’s vast, existing archive of radio programs and films focused on LA music exploration. This robust collection of sights and sounds will be constantly expanded with new content from a broad range of contributors. All archives will be tagged with: year, genre, and location details to help define it within the sonic landscape. In addition, we will present content posts as geo-tagged pins on an interactive Los Angeles map, which can be used for educational and cultural projects. The Sound Share LA site aims to create an evolving document of Los Angeles music that will serve residents and visitors now and into the future.

In addition to the website, Sound Share LA will host monthly community radio events. These site specific, live broadcasts will occur in locations of historical, musical significance throughout Los Angeles. They will be free, full day happenings, open to attendees of all ages. We will bring together some of the most influential music minds in Los Angeles to share stories and live performances associated with the host neighborhood’s musical past, present and future. The radio programs will feature interviews, performances and DJ sets streamed live from the remote sites via the Sound Share LA website. Historical album art, video content and photographs will be displayed for the public to examine hands-on. These programs will immediately be made available as archives on the Sound Share LA website. These community radio events will enhance the project’s online offerings and provide a recurrent forum for direct public involvement. Residents will come together to discover the cultural contributions their neighborhoods have had on Los Angeles.

IMPACT:

Through our actions we hope to spark inspiration within the Los Angeles community and beyond. Sound Share LA will serve as a living document of vibrant creativity from our inspiring city, telling the story of LA's diverse sonic heritage and providing a platform for the tales yet untold.

What are some of your organization’s most important achievements to date?

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dublab has been broadcasting since 1999. More than 300,000 international listeners connect to our audio streams and podcasts monthly. Over the past 14 years dublab.com has been critically acclaimed as one of the premier Internet radio stations in the world. The LA Weekly says, "Tuning into the Dubstream at any given time is a music lover’s dream." dublab is part of Los Angeles’ cultural landscape and continues to create innovative music programming that provides an important voice to the city.

Besides its radio programming, dublab has presented hundreds of free concerts throughout the city of Los Angeles. We have curated the main music stages at the Eagle Rock Music Festival for six years running, at the Abbot Kinney Festival for the past three years and 2013 marks our third year presenting a series of free, dublab curated concerts as part of the Levitt Pavilion summer series. Our organization has also contributed to numerous free, public programs at the Getty Center, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Los Angeles Public Library, Santa Monica Pier, Grammy Museum, REDCAT and dozens of other major arts institutions in Los Angeles.

dublab has succeeded as a community supported organization funded through contributions and underwriting from individual donors and organizations from around the world. In 2011 dublab became the recipient of multi-year grant funding from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the following year received a grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Its longevity is in great part due to the organization’s successful fundraising strategy and financial stability.

Please identify any partners or collaborators who will work with you on this project.

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Sound Share LA will tap into dublab’s collective of internationally recognized musicians, DJ’s and filmmakers for contributions to the website. We will invite a wide array of collaborators, ranging from pioneering elders to influential, up and coming musicians to participate in the community radio broadcasts . Prominent journalists and historians will moderate the live discussions and produce features for the website.

We will expand the impact of the project by collaborating with major arts institutions, cultural centers, music venues and media outlets. In addition, we will actively encourage participation of web developers, leading to the creation of third party mobile apps, multimedia art installations and more.

Please explain how you will evaluate your project. How will you measure success?

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The Sound Share LA initiative will be evaluated by the following metrics:

PUBLIC FEEDBACK:

To evaluate the response from the public, an e-mail survey will be conducted with participants at the end of the project’s first year. Feedback given by the public will be compiled with anecdotal reports from event staff.

MEDIA RESPONSE:

Press received will be taken into consideration alongside public opinion. Positive coverage in at least one major Los Angeles media outlet per event will be considered a success. We will also take into account the depth of social media activity throughout the course of the initiative and the number of followers gained.

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS:

We will collect website statistics, such as number of unique visitors and listeners. In order to consider the project successful, web traffic must be comparable to equivalent online media platforms. Attendance figures and live tune-ins for each community broadcast event will also be recorded. These statistics should expand as the project develops.

PROGRAM QUALITY:

The staff will conduct a review at the end of each community broadcast event to evaluate its success based on enthusiasm of the audience and depth of engagement. At the end of the first year of programming we will determine if the quality of the project's web presence and live broadcasts across Los Angeles County successfully fulfilled the initiative’s goals.

How will your project benefit Los Angeles? Please be specific.

The Sound Share LA initiative will have a positive and lasting impact on Los Angeles by:

- Enhancing education, research and stimulation of tourism by creating a geo-tagged content map and searchable content database, organized by musician, year, neighborhood and genre.

- Increasing community awareness of the city's cultural heritage, history and value.

- Providing the opportunity for residents to engage with local musicians in a live setting.

- Educating listeners around the world about Los Angeles’ diverse musical contributions.

The monthly community radio broadcasts will have an immediate impact within the neighborhoods where they occur. The public will come together to explore notable LA music phases in the very spaces these genres thrived. Audiences will enjoy a full day of free programming giving them rare insight into the people and places behind these influential music developments: 1950’s Central Avenue jazz scene, 1960’s Sunset Strip music revolution, 1970’s Laurel Canyon folk movement, 1980’s downtown punk rock explosion or 1990’s South Central rap uprising among many others.

Oral histories from the pioneers who forged these music movements will be shared alongside input from the generations who followed in their footsteps. DJ sets and performances will bring the music genres to life. Attendees and those accessing the radio broadcasts will learn about the musical heritage of specific LA neighborhoods. This experience will educate them about truly unique music breakthroughs from Los Angeles. Eventually these radio shows will have a long term impact as they are made available as online archives.

The Sound Share LA project will have a direct impact on the arts and cultural vitality of Los Angeles by creating an ongoing document of not only the past but also contemporary music made in Los Angeles. The Sound Share LA website, in combination with quality live events staged throughout Los Angeles, will expose residents to the rich heritage in every corner of our expansive city.

What would success look like in the year 2050 regarding your indicator?

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Los Angeles has long been known as a launchpad for progress, helping advance international culture through innovation. In the year 2050, Los Angeles will be the undisputed cultural capital of the world. It will be the space where sea change takes form and launches across the globe.

LA 2050 will brim with diverse, artistic voices who feel empowered to better their community through creative energy. They will be a populace of philanthropists for whom giving comes as second nature. These informed citizens will have shaped a government that guides the city with empathy and knowledge, finding creative solutions for the issues that impact its residents. The seeds of forward thinking will have been cultivated through an education system that encourages artistic action as central to productive living.

This conscious city will celebrate its wide cultural spectrum. By 2050, artists of all walks should enjoy an abundance of opportunities to make a living through their craft. Media outlets will offer an expansive view of the arts, blurring the line between mainstream and underground. Citizens along with a plethora of neighborhood based arts organizations will participate in the daily conversation of evolving culture. Through the collective energy of a healthy, happy and inspired population, Los Angeles will continue to serve as a beacon to the world. Sound Share LA will help materialize this optimistic vision of a creative Los Angeles in the year 2050 and beyond.

Discussion

11

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The Dublab team is perfect to execute a proposal such as this. Their organization and reputation as a cultural hub already provide a framework for success. Best of luck! and hope to see Sound Share LA fully realized

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Yes! Especially in a way that is free and accessible to the public. In addition to being an amazing Los Angeles resource, this is a great way to foster new concepts in free music downloading and sharing!

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Here are a few links to articles about dublab.com that you all might find interesting::
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/14/entertainment/la-et-night-dublab14-20111014
http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2012/11/dublab_internet_radio_mark_frosty_mcneill_shaun_koplow_diego_herrera.php
http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2012/11/dublab